Where did all this hostility come from? How comfortable, how contented you are, to think yourself better than others! You are right, and everyone else is wrong! Oh, how can they be so stubborn, to reject the truth when it is so plain to see? Must be nice.
No, Protestants do not now, nor have they ever, approved divorce. My stepfather’s desire to serve his Baptist congregation was rejected because he’d married a divorced woman, my dear mother. Protestants are frequently, however, more compassionate towards the divorced who are not excluded from worship, while the RCC excludes them from what does seem to be the most important thing to any Catholic–receiving the Host at Communion. For whom did Jesus come? The saints who follow all the rules or for the brokenhearted, the sick, the poor, the sinner?
You do your own faith a grave disservice by condemning others–with or without accurate information. If and only if the RCC is the One True Church, how many converts are you going to get spewing self-satisfied condemnation? Be peaceful. positive, loving, open-hearted, you’ll get more converts that way. Or do you care about saving anybody? Perhaps you are content to know that you are included among the saints.
You’ve completely missed my point. How can the human mind truly comprehend the divine? In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul truly said that we don’t see clearly now, but when we get to heaven we will understand. Yes, Jesus gave us good information during His earthly life, but as I’ve said, He was constrained by the limits of the human capacity for understanding and by the clumsiness of human language.
And insofaras the majority of us read the words of Jesus (which were recorded, at the earliest, forty years after His Ascension) in translation.
The story of the men and the elephant DOES apply, because these men with limited ability to perceive (like all of humankind) were doing their best to discover and explain. But their limitations (blindness) necessarily introduced errors, though they were doing their best. We all do our best to understand God and God’s Will, and we do try to do our best. Protestants agree, faith without works IS dead. Faith without works isn’t true faith. That’s how you can tell–the fruit that faith bears!
Even RCC saints have said that it is impossible to truly comprehend the Will of God. See Thomas Merton–“Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.”
koti.mbnet.fi/amoira/merton1.htm
Don’t condemn Protestant immorality so quickly without remembering the immorality of individual Catholics, even those in positions of formal leadership. Remember Romans 3:23 “For ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”
You say “If that is the faith you choose to believe in, fine. But as you believe it, you must also accept that to those outside it, it appears rather concocted when you cannot find any of the precepts of that faith for the first 1500 years of Christianity, which was Catholic and nothing but until the 16th century.” That’s untrue–there were other Christian sects all along, but I suppose they are irrelevant because all you want to do is demonstrate your personal superiority.
You say “That strikes me as a very confusing system and one that is prone to errors and division with no authority to do anything but sit by and watch the splits go on forever.” I recall that Jesus came to save souls and heal hearts, not to establish any system.
If you love your faith, fine with me. And if you want to start a quarrel, well, you’ve got my answer. I’m going off-line for a while, but before I go I must say I’ve lost my patience with the holier-than-thou crowd of which you are a part.
Think about it.
Dett
